Labor(ious) Weekend

Labor Day Weekend was a whole weekend of real "labor" for me, as I vowed to start and finish quilting Picket Fence (pattern by Elsie Campbell from the book String Quilts), a huge quilt that I first blogged about in this post, in November 2011. Gosh, that was shy of six years ago! For a long time, I've been meaning to finish this quilt. And the end is in sight.

This is what quilting a 98" X 112" quilt looks like. It's the largest quilt I've ever quilted, and it took about 14-1/2 hours to quilt. I timed myself, calculating that each pass - from one side of the quilt to the opposite side - took about 55 minutes. So, 16 passes. Spreading out the quilting over three days was better for my still-touchy (carpal tunnel syndrome) wrist.

The quilting pattern is simple, and in fact is the same design I saw a long time ago on a Picket Fence quilt hanging in a vendor booth at an AQS show in Des Moines. All the quilting is parallel with the piecing of each block. No need to do any design fancier than that when the piecing is so busy that the quilting hardly shows.

It's the texture that shows. 

Batting is Quilter's Dream Request Loft Cotton. Threads are: Aurifil 50-weight in color 2615 silver gray in the bobbin, and in the lightest piecing; and in the medium and darker piecing the thread is Superior King Tut variegated 40-weight.

I even made 12-plus yards of binding.

But binding will wait until later in the week. That's because Tuesday evening I'm the guest speaker for Quilting Guild of The Villages (QGOTV), and will be giving my Domestic Machine Quilting program followed by a trunk show of 14 quilts.

I'm pretty excited about giving my program because there may be a large audience. Like a couple hundred quilters? QGOTV is having a contest: the chapter that has the most members in attendance will win a tray of baked goods delivered to one of their weekly meetings. So with 20 chapters, and more than 1,100 members in total, the turnout could be good sized. I definitely need to be "on" when I give this program!

Then, on Wednesday I'm teaching domestic machine quilting to 20 QGOTV members, and that's an all-day (six hour) workshop.

Another reason I can't be in a hurry to finish Picket Fence is because once the binding is sewn to the quilt, it will take hours to hand-sew down. Oh, but the finish! Finally, after more than five years, we'll sleep under a quilt that's large enough to completely cover our king-sized bed.

Pictures of the finished product coming soon! Linda